Thread by @DrPJWilliams

Thread on the asymmetry of Scriptural language about God's sovereignty.

Arguably there are many biblical texts which present God or Christ as superintending every particular (Col. 1:17; Heb. 1:3).

However, God is not presented as standing in an equal relationship to all things.

I will explore Matthew 25 and Romans 9 for how they specifically differentiate divine relationship to good things/salvation and bad things/damnation.

We start with the sheep and the goats of Matthew 25:

King to the sheep:

‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. …' (Matthew 25:34)

King to the goats:

‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.' (Matthew 25:41)

There are a number of asymmetries here.

1) 'Come' vs 'Depart from me'. The prepositional phrase in the latter emphasizes separation.

2) 'you who are blessed by my Father' vs 'you cursed'

The agent is named only in the positive case.

Of course, in the OT God may be said to curse (Gen. 12:3), but the explicit divine agent is more commonly connected with blessing than with cursing.

This is one way the narratives connect blessing more closely with God than cursing.

The sheep are told to 'inherit'. There's no equivalent verb for the goats.

The sheep are told to go to a good thing prepared for them; the goats are told to go to a bad thing prepared for others (the devil and his angels).

The sheep are told to go to something explicitly prepared pre-cosmically. The pre-cosmic element is lacking for the goats.

Now to Romans 9:13-23.

At one level there is perfect symmetry in 9:13 between God loving Jacob and hating Esau. However, we will see that perfect symmetry is not maintained.

9:15 explicitly only has the positives:

“I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”

Likewise 9:16 only the positive 'mercy'.

9:17 tells of the tough fate of Pharaoh raised up that God's power/name might be known.

This clearly indicates that Pharaoh's fate is collateral (we can debate this word) to the divine intention of announcing his name. The bad effect on Pharaoh was not the intent.

9:18 then gives us a symmetrical verse wherein God both has mercy and hardens. However, these parallel activities result from different intents as seen in 9:17.

9:19-21 deals with the objection 'Why does God blame?' and rules it illegitimate.

9:22 then goes into a hypothetical scenario 'What if...'

The purpose of a 'What if...' sentence must be both to say that it could be like this, but also to distance us from concluding too firmly that it actually is.

In the 'What if ...' sentence God's intention was to show his anger / power, but some things gave him no pleasure.

He 'bore with much longsuffering', i.e. to use crass language 'didn't enjoy it'.

Moreover, these were 'vessels of anger prepared for destruction'. The verb prepare could here be passive (as I take it, because of the contrast with the following verse).

9:23 then states the positive aim of demonstrating the wealth of his glory on 'vessels of mercy which he had prepared beforehand for glory'. Three asymmetries here: active 'he prepared'. Different word for prepare (more positive) and the 'beforehand'.

Thus both Rom 9 and Matt 25 are wanting to put the salvific stuff as pre-cosmic. They don't say other stuff isn't pre-cosmic, but the silence is strong.

In my studies I've found at least 8 ways in which texts depict God as a being who delights in/enjoys salvation and is more closely connected with that than with damnation. All said, he is both sovereign and wanting to save.

Here are the 8:

Asymmetrical frequency
Immediate vs mediated actions
Active vs passive
Things God delights in vs things he tolerates / dislikes
Asymmetry of purpose
Explicitly pre-cosmic vs not explicitly pre-cosmic
Agent named vs agent not named
Divine presence vs absence

It's not that a negative thing cannot be found on the active side (e.g. Isaiah 45:7), but this is significantly less frequent.

Different biblical authors may depict this asymmetry of purpose in different ways.

But looked at as a whole it is hard to escape the conclusion that God is both sovereign and wanting to save.

Biblical terms like 'elect' are only used positively. Sometimes theologians like to create parallels, but doing so can also upset the careful balance of biblical terms.